Long Sentences

“What is the point of those long sentences with so many clauses that you forget what the subject is?” our reader DianeOr asks. I’ve wondered about this, too, and as I’m nearing the end of the book I have two thoughts.

First, isn’t this sort of writing a hazard (or virtue, depending on your point of view) of many ambitious twentieth-century novels? As Stephen Spender notes in the introduction, Lowry was emulating James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Joyce famously boasted that he wanted to “give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.” That documentary goal, coupled with the stream-of-consciousness narration, lends itself to an endless recitation of detail:

And when the good fathers had reached the appointed place, the house of Bernard Kiernan and Co, limited, 8, 9 and 10 little Britain street, wholesale grocers, wine and brandy shippers, licensed for the sale of beer, wine and spirits for consumption on the premises, the celebrant blessed the house and censed the mullioned windows and the groynes and the vaults and the arrises and the capitals and the pediments and the cornices and the engrailed arches and the spires and the cupolas and sprinkled the lintels thereof with blessed water and prayed that God might bless that house as he had blessed the house of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and make the angels of His light to inhabit therein.

I don’t think you could reconstruct either Quauhnahuac or Tomalìn from “Under the Volcano,” but, as Vicky suggests, the book, like Joyce’s, does have the power to mimic consciousness.

More recent examples of the long, detail-rich sentence can be found in Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe trilogy, each volume of which takes place over a holiday weekend. Here’s Bascombe, in “Independence Day,” looking back on happier times, reminiscing about buying a car with his wife, who has since divorced him:

We drove out in my mother’s old Chrysler Newport to the dealership in Hastings-on-Hudson, kibitzed around the showroom for a hour and a half—chin-rubbing, ear-scratching potential young buyers—fingering the mirror surfaces of some olive-drab five-door job, slipping into and out of its sensible seats, sniffing its chilly perfume, checking out the glove box capacity, the usual spare tire mounts and jack assembly, finally pretending even to drive it—Ann side by side with me in the driver’s seat, both of us staring ahead through the dealership window at a make-believe road to the future as new Volvo owners.

To me, that passage was reminiscent of Yvonne dreamily looking forward to the house she hopes to share with the Consul when they leave Mexico:

—the house, dappled with misty light that fell softly through the small new leaves, and then the mist rolling away across the water, and the mountains, still white with snow appearing sharp and clear against the blue sky, the blue wood smoke from the driftwood fire curling out of the chimney; the sloping shingled woodshed on whose roof the dogwood blossoms fell, the wood packed with beauty inside; the axe, the trowels, the rake, the spade, the deep, cool well with its guardian figure, a flotsam, a wooden sculpture of the sea fixed above it; the old kettle, the new kettle, the teapot, the coffee pot, the double boilers, the saucepans, the cupboard.

But there’s something else going on here. In addition to rendering consciousness and longing, all those sub-clauses and piled-up details allow Lowry to constantly drop references to what D. T. Max argues is the novel’s true subject: the Second World War. As the book progressed, I had the sense that what the Consul, Hugh, and Yvonne were so anxiously looking for in all those details were signs of the coming calamity—signs that are simultaneously personal and geopolitical.

There’s the reference to the Holocaust (noted by Ligaya), the turkey who resembles Neville Chamberlain, and the recurring headlines from the Battle of the Ebro. Hugh twice compares the course of his life to Hitler’s, and at one point the Consul thinks,

Knock knock: who’s there? Cat. Cat who? Catastrophe.

The reluctance of the crowd to do anything for the dying Indian seems a pretty clear allegory for the Western powers standing by as fascism takes its course.

Again I found myself thinking of Samuel Beckett, whose second novel, “Watt,” was written during the Nazi occupation of France, while he and his wife were hiding out in Rousillon. Beckett, who was decorated for his role in the Resistance, said that he wrote “Watt” as “a means of staying sane.” The book’s title character is an obsessively rational servant who ultimately fails in his attempt to apply logic rigorously to the world.

Here’s Watt trying to see a pattern in how his master, Mr. Knott, rearranges the furniture:

Thus it was not rare to find, on the Sunday, the tallboy on its feet by the fire, and the dressing table on its head by the bed, and the night-stool on its face by the door, and the washand-stand on its back by the window; and, on the Monday, the tallboy on its back by the bed, and the dressing table on its face by the door, and the night-stool on its back by the window and the washand-stand on its feet by the fire; and on the Tuesday…

This sentence came to my mind after the passage in Chapter 10 of “Under the Volcano,” in which the Consul describes waiting at the train station:

And now, one after one, the terrible trains appeared on top of the raised horizon…downhill: clipperty-one clipperty one: cipperty two clipperty two: clipperty-three, clipperty-three: clipperty-four, clipperty-four: alas, thank God, not stopping, and the lines shaking, that station flying, the coal dust, black bitumous: lickety-cut, lickety-cut: and then another train: clipperty one, clipperty one, coming in the other direction, swaying, whizzing, two feet above the lines, flying, clipperty-two, with one light burning against the morning, clipperty-three, clipperty-three…

In both passages, there is a desperate attempt to nail down all the possibilities in a given situation, to keep the world under control by enumerating it—an attempt made all the more poignant because of its futility. All sentences, like all books, must come to an end.

Despite my initial difficulties with “Under the Volcano,” I felt more sadness than relief when I read its final words; I felt myself wishing for a few more of those long Lowry sentences.